My journey to getting back overseas and experiencing what the world has to offer… and other random thoughts.

Oh Floridia

I have been thinking more and more about this sailing thing and how much fun it would be.

I took a little time tonight at work to look into boats and jobs in good old Floridia.

Both prospects look like a huge pain in the ass for someone who knows fuck all about boats.

There are TONS of different sailboats and all of the blue water ones look pretty acceptable to the untrained eye.

Chris mentioned that he was opposed to wood hull boats because they are a veritable shit-ton of upkeep and I tend to agree with him.

I LOVE wooden boat decks, I think they are absolutely gorgeous but the amount of work just on those and they aren’t even in the water, yeah, no thanks.

You even have choices as to what the weight is in your keel to keep your boat upright.

It seems like a ton of choices that we would really have to research even though we would probably get a used boat anyway and the two biggest questions will be does it go overseas and can we afford it.

If we are looking at it, I am sure it goes overseas…

The second question is probably a resounding negative, Ghost Rider.

We are poor.

I have found some places that offer sailing lessons and the 3-hour introduction to sailing looks pretty affordable.

After that though…

So, I started to look for jobs.

Now, I have a buddy, Jimmy, who works on a liveaboard charter out of Miami.

At one point he said he may be able to get me on as a cook for the trips down to the Carribean that they make. It would be a good learning experience, if for anything else than the act of cooking while everything is trying to run away from me.

The thing that gives me pause is I don’t know how much I would learn by working below decks in the galley all the time.

Also, I have cooked for people and I love to cook but it would be nerve wracking for a while trying to get the hang of it and coming up with meal plans for the entire voyage.

I still may hit Jimmy up if we are making this thing happen though.

As for other jobs, everything so far looks like it requires experience.

I despise trying to get into something that everything seems to require experience in. How does one gain experience if one has none?

Looking at what seems available, outside of whatever experience they require, I believe I could do the job of deck hand, cook or steward.

There was another site I looked at that had far more jobs but I didn’t have much chance to read through what all they were.

I will try to figure out what all positions I could possibly do but it will require someone letting me in the door.

I have to go back and find that site, I wish I would have saved it.

Trying to navigate which ones are blue water boats and which ones aren’t is kind of hard to figure out but I did read a great article on how to pick a blue water sailboat which helps a little.

The author goes through the obvious steps of purpose and budget.

But he takes it further by getting into the comfort of sailing on blue water and explaining how the comfort quotient is measured.

There are four comfort classes of boats and a blue water vessel will be in the A class, meaning it rates 32 or higher on the comfort scale.

30 is pretty decent and from what I understand they make this rating based on how it would fare in the water being just a plain boat with no added weight.

So, if it rates a 32 as a base boat, just adding fuel will make it rate even higher not to mention everything you require for a voyage.

35 or higher is smooth sailing and what to aim for if you are going blue water, so long as you do not give up all your speed.

Comfort is great and will make life much better but if a standard 2-week journey takes your slow ass boat 6 weeks… you may need to keep looking.

The two types of boats the author of the article was looking for was either a Ketch or a Sloop, looking on Boattrader, they do not have many Ketchs but they have a ton of fairly affordable Sloops.